


Grisette

by scioscribe



Category: Portrait de la jeune fille en feu | Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Genre: Bittersweet, Cooking, F/F, Mushrooms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:02:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23688859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: They had only the one mushroom knife, and it stayed in Sophie’s small, capable hands; Marianne and Héloïse managed with ordinary paring knives, cutting through the fleshy stalks with less delicacy.
Relationships: Héloïse/Marianne & Sophie (Portrait of a Lady on Fire), Héloïse/Marianne (Portrait of a Lady on Fire)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 52
Collections: Flash In The Pan: A Food Flash Exchange





	Grisette

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ashling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/gifts).



They had only the one mushroom knife, and it stayed in Sophie’s small, capable hands; Marianne and Héloïse managed with ordinary paring knives, cutting through the fleshy stalks with less delicacy. Their knifepoints bit their fingers so many times that the mushrooms in their basket—an earthy, dusky assortment, some looking like burnished wood and others like wilted flowers—were decorated with occasional garnet drops of blood. Héloïse took Marianne’s knife away from her.

“If you do this for much longer, you won’t be able to hold a paintbrush. You should let me do it.”

Marianne raised one of Héloïse’s hands to her lips, taking in the sight of all the little nicks and the pink indentations from the awkward way she'd held the knife handle. No gentleman in Milan would ever see her like this—so immersed in this world of rough convent wool and cotton and chilly morning dew and plain work. She kissed Héloïse’s knuckles.

“Would you protect me from myself?” she said lightly.

“I don’t know,” Héloïse said, studying her, “but from some accident of ineptitude, yes.”

From painting her as some smooth and smiling creature with a too-rounded face and too few shadows. Each time Marianne looked at her, she found some neglected detail, uncaptured at that fist pass, but Héloïse could not be conveyed in details, not really. She was more than an assembly of sketches and stolen glances.

Their skirts were spread out against the forest floor, overlapping just at the hems. They had taken all the mushrooms that were safe, examining each grisette in the clearing’s sunlight before they dared to add it to the basket.

“We never had them at the convent,” Héloïse said, turning one of the small, tawny mushrooms over in her fingers, brushing away the dirt. “There was always too much of a chance the picker would bring back something poisonous by mistake.” She shifted through their basket, turning up a blusher and raising pink on its flesh as she pressed down with one thumb. “Or these, because they look too much like the false ones.” She let the mushroom tumble back down with the rest.

“Sophie will know how to tell them all apart,” Marianne said. She had known the looks of all the plants they’d needed for her drink, and she must have picked far more mushrooms in her life.

Sophie did know, and she didn’t even look askance at the ragged stalks. She dealt with their combined baskets matter-of-factly, sorting the mushrooms out by kind.

“Did we get anything poisonous?” Héloïse said.

Sophie shook her head, and as she tapped each head of the grisettes, a wide smile spread across her face. “We can have omelettes tonight.”

They stayed in the kitchen as Sophie cooked them, sautéing the mushrooms in fresh butter after Marianne had carefully patted them all dry. Héloïse had told her that being in Sophie’s kitchen reminded her a little of Mass, with each cracked egg or bubble of sauce like the note in an Alleluia; Marianne saw it as a warm stronghold of colors, licks of orange firelight and violet-black aubergines. Now she studied the shapes, from the uneven bumps of the mushrooms to the circles of egg forming in the skillets to the sprigs of herb. She could see more value in still lives, in this place. Marianne had broken open something inside her, bringing not only the passions of the great subjects within her reach but also some aching desire for time to slow, to stop, for the world to narrow down to this one dinner shared among the three of them.

Sophie served the omelettes, spooning out the mushrooms with them, and Héloïse cut the bread.

“I love how the crust cracks,” Sophie said. She wiped a damp strand of hair off her forehead. “When you cut the whole loaf all at once, it sounds like people talking.”

“Perhaps they're saying, ‘Feed me, feed me,’” Héloïse suggested.

Marianne only luxuriated, letting herself dwell on how the omelettes melted away in her mouth, how each perfectly browned mushroom looked against the white of the plate, how the chatter of Sophie’s bread returned when her teeth closed on the crust of her own piece. She chose to keep her eyes on Héloïse—to think of the twilight as only the moment when her cheek was cast over with lavender. Not as the end of another one of their precious days.


End file.
